A Guide to LinkedIn Sales Navigator Lead Generation
LinkedIn Sales Navigator can be a powerful tool for B2B marketers and salespeople. This tool can enable the users to increase the quality of leads generated.
What is LinkedIn Sales Navigator?
It is a premium offering from LinkedIn that enables you to directly message other members on LinkedIn without restrictions. You do have limited monthly credits, from experience, the limit is 50, so you can send 50 direct messages once a month.
The direct message is different from a “Connection note” (See left image below) which is a small message you can send to someone when connecting with them. The direct message (See image on the right below) appears in their LinkedIn inbox and through this, you can attach documents and link.
Sales Navigator also enables you to keep track of the latest activities of the companies and individuals you are targeting. From a sales and marketing perspective, this premium feature enables its users to implement “Social Selling” which is a method of nurturing sales prospects by building meaningful relationships and trust which influences their purchase decisions.
Key Features of LinkedIn Sales Navigator for Lead Generation
One of the key features of Sales Navigator is “Saved Searches”. This feature enables you to create your filters based to create a target group. As you can see below, a Saved Search focused on key companies and job titles for the Energy Market in the United Kingdom.
By clicking the button “Save Search”, Sales Navigator will notify you whenever LinkedIn member matches the filters you have saved which can occur when people change jobs or gets hired by the key organisations you are focusing on.
This will provide you a consistent flow of relevant LinkedIn users you can contact and build a connection with, therefore, implementing social selling techniques, generating leads and eventually a sale.
This feature leads us to another key feature of Sales Navigator which is the ability to add the results from the saved search into a list and through this list, you can keep track of the actions you have taken on the contacts from your search. This feature enables you to easily manage potential leads and leads you have generated through Sales Navigator.
You will also get notifications when the contacts from your saved search has done particular activities on LinkedIn such as share posts or make a comment and the same will happen for the companies you have added to your search.
These features can help you boost your potential to generate leads on LinkedIn because you will be able to personalise your direct message to the people you are contacting since you’ll be aware of the persons interests and recent activities on LinkedIn as well as any useful information about the company your targeting audience works for. As mentioned before, social selling is a method of building meaningful relationships and trust and with the information Sales Navigator provides, you will be able to achieve this.
A Potential Approach for LinkedIn Sales Navigator Lead Generation
The aim of this approach is to connect with people you contact on LinkedIn. By connecting with them, they will see the content you share on LinkedIn and you can also send them a direct message without making use of the limited monthly credits you have with Sales Navigator.
This approach will be focusing on relevant people that recently got promoted or recently hired within a relevant job role by the companies you are targeting in your saved search. As mentioned earlier, Sales Navigator will notify you whenever this happens.
So, let’s run this through…
- You have a saved search focusing on engineers currently working at key companies within the energy industry in the UK.
- You get a notification from Sales Navigator, John Doe has recently been hired as an Electrical Engineer at National Grid.
- You add this person to your list of “Key Energy Market Contacts” and you proceed to send John Doe a direct message:
“Hello John Doe,
I just want to congratulate you in your new role at National Grid and I wish you all the best.
If it’s okay with you, I’d like to send you a connection request since I have a huge interest in electrical engineering within the energy sector, given my role at [Insert your company name].
I enjoy sharing ideas, starting discussions with engineers like yourself through my LinkedIn posts as I’ve found it’s a great way to learn and keep up to date with what’s happening.
I look forward to hearing from you,
Kind regards,
[Your name]”
Best case scenario, this person is very interested in connecting with people that enjoys sharing ideas and keeping up to date with engineering topics within the energy sector, since that person is highly motivated and willing to learn and engage with topics related to their role and sector due to the fact that this person has just been hired or promoted. So you get a connection!
Worse case scenario, your message gets declined and you move on. But you don’t stop there, you test out different messages, different approaches or change the wording until you find one that works but don’t forget the aim which is to get a connection as a result of a meaningful first contact.
So, you get to a point where your direct messages are working and you’re building a network of recently hired or promoted engineers at key companies in the energy sector, what next?
Content
With Sales Navigator, you are building an audience based off meaningful first contact since you congratulated them on their new role and you mentioned you share information they would be interested in due to their role and sector.
This means they will either visit your page looking for useful and relevant content or if they see your name on their timeline, there’s a good chance they will pay attention.
LinkedIn enables you to share content in various formats to your connections:
- Video
- Images
- Documents (Powerpoint and PDF)
- Polls
- Articles
- Newsletters
Get creative and use all these formats at your disposal, if you’re a salesperson, and you believe you’re not creative, work with the marketing team to create content to share with your audience.
Ensure the content is relevant and insightful, enabling you to position yourself as someone who is helpful and knowledgeable. The key with your content is to get them to become a lead and I have two methods you can implement:
Get them to provide you information which gives you something you can follow up with via direct message. This information enables you to generate a level interest from them for a product or solution, making them a lead.
For example:
You share a poll asking your connections about their biggest pain points in their role. The answers you provide them in the poll are pain points the products or solutions your company offers can solve.
From their answers, you send them a direct message, starting a conversation about these pain points and suggest solutions / products your company offers, which solves the problems. This should generate a level of interest that will make the connection qualify as a lead.
Give them the opportunity to expand their knowledge on a particular topic that is relevant to their role and industry via gated content.
Gated content is any content piece that requires someone to give something to access it. The content can be an eBook, Whitepaper, Webinar etc. Anything you think your audience will find extremely useful.
In this case, you encourage them to give you their work contact details such as email address and work number by filling in a form to get access to a Whitepaper that promises to give them relevant and insightful information. Make sure you deliver on that promise as you can easily lose trust!
They fill in the form, lead generated!
Conclusion
LinkedIn Sales Navigator Lead Generation is all bout finding a way to connect and converse with your target audience in a meaningful way and build a relationship and trust. Use the information Sales Navigator provides as well as your expertise and other sources of information to increase your chances of building meaningful connections with your target audience.
Don’t forget the importance of content and make use of social selling tactics to turn these contacts to leads. If you’re not as good at creating engaging content, make use of people who are, such as your marketing team and develop a monthly plan of the content you are going to share with your target audience through your LinkedIn profile.
Since you’re interested in lead generation, check out our Passive Lead Generation course!
